The Great Ordeal

by R. Scott Bakker

  It was statuary, countless images, endless pageants, somehow prised out of the mountain’s hide. Sorweel knew this because of the very ruin that so concerned Serwa. Some sections had sloughed away like decrepit plaster, whereas others had been pocked by titanic impacts, revealing graven recesses deep enough for a man to hide. And he realized: for all its mad, bloated artifice, Ishterebinth was a place of senescence and death. Slowly, inexorably, weather and weight and assault were stripping it—denuding it. Channels scored the mountainous facades, tributaries where plummeting stonework had collected into rivers of artifice and gouged ravines through the granite embroidery. Debris lay heaped about the foot of every scarp, in some places as high or higher than Sakarpus’s walls. Broken meaning.

  “The Stronghold is Exalted no longer,” Moënghus called out in wry warning.

  Sorweel shared his misapprehension. An ally who could not keep his own walls was no ally.

  “The ghouls are many things, Brother. Some less than Men, some more, and some incomprehensible.”

  The Prince-Imperial grinned. “What are you saying?”

  Sorweel could tell that for all the deference Moënghus showed his sister, he still saw her as the pestering child she had once pretended to be.

  A dark look from his sister. “Only that humility would better serve our father.”

  Moënghus cast a contemptuous glance at Sorweel.

  “And if they decide that Father has violated the Niom?”

  “Nil’giccas was Seswatha’s friend.”

  Her tone remained poised, as always, at the pitch of indifference, but Sorweel somehow knew she was less than convinced.

  “Bah! Look at this place, Serri! Look! Is this the House of a sane king?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  The Emwama milled about them, watching with a wonder marred for the perverse size of their eyes.

  “You remember what Father told us,” Moënghus pressed. “The confused always seek the security of rules. That was why the Niom was so important, why this”—a thumb thrown in Sorweel’s direction—“kag’s hatred was so important!”

  The Grandmistress scowled. “What do you want me to do?”

  “What I wanted from the beginning!”

  “No, Podi.”

  A moment of fierce appraisal passed between the siblings, and somehow Sorweel knew that Moënghus meant to kill him—here and now if he could.

  “Is that the Dûnyain in you, Serri? Or is it Mother?”

  “I said, no.”

  Moënghus glared at Sorweel with barely constrained fury.

  “Yul’irisa kak-kak meritru …” he grated to his sister.

  And though Sorweel understood none of it, in his soul’s ear he heard, If I snap his neck anyway?

  “It would make no difference.”

  Something in her tone hooked the gazes of both men.

  The ghouls. They were coming.

  So they stood breathless on the High Floor beneath the Soggomantic Gate, the Believer-King and the children of the Aspect-Emperor. A murmur passed through the throngs, even though only those Emwama near the fore could have possibly seen the approach of their ageless masters. Terror has its own vision. A kind of cringing eagerness overcame the creatures, one that reminded Sorweel of beaten dogs. They did not so much crowd the three travellers as shrink against them, their smiles garish and false beneath looks of shy dread. One even clutched his hand—child fingers, only horned and callused like a man’s.

  Sorweel found himself returning the insistent squeeze. And in a moment of madness he understood that the siblings hadn’t tormented him because he had witnessed their incest—the incest had been the torment! They had afflicted him because the terms of the Niom demanded that he hate the Anasûrimbor …

  Because they needed evidence of what the Goddess would never let them see.

  And now they thought themselves doomed.

  What had he done? The youth stood riven. The Nonmen of Ishterebinth issued from the lesser gate to the right, an otherworldly file. Where the stone and lichens sopped the light, they reflected it, flashing small and iridescent beneath the vast, graven heights. Their gait betrayed neither urgency nor alarm.

  Moënghus cursed, his great frame taut.

  “Say nothing,” Serwa admonished the two men. “Do as I do.”

  The False Men gathered more radiance as they approached, such was the burnish of their gown-length hauberks. Hairless as porcelain. Eyes like obsidian. Pale as melting snow. The mere image of them constricted Sorweel’s breast. Fair of face. Narrow of hip and broad of shoulder. Imperious without the least pretension—the assurance of an indisputable ascendancy in grace and glory as much as form. With their every step, something clawed Sorweel from the inside, a panic as old as his Race—a recognition, not of something other, but of something stolen. Where the Emwama disgusted for being less, the Nonmen repelled for being more, for achieving what were human sums, a measure writ into every Mannish soul. This was what made them False, inhuman …

  The way they made beasts of Men.

  Small wonder the Gods demanded their extermination.

  The ghouls began fanning across the mall behind the foremost of their number, the one with small pelts of fur hanging against his chest. The Bar of Heaven glared above everything, a column hewn from the sun, so tall as to chase shadows into puddles about booted feet. The Nonmen hauberks, which had seemed chitinous mirrors, now made powder of the light, which coursed serpentine and scintillating up and down their forms. Black pommels jutted above their shoulders. Small moans and curious, keening whispers broke out among the Emwama. The little fingers in his hand curled into claws.

  Sorweel’s heart began hammering.

  “Say nothing,” the Swayali witch murmured.

  The Nonman with the necklace of pelts—human scalps, Sorweel numbly realized—began barking incomprehensible words, his voice deep and ariose. The great mob of Emwama fell to their faces in almost perfect unison, so much so it seemed the ground itself had dropped. Sorweel lurched for vertigo, clenched his now empty hand. Both he and Moënghus looked to Serwa, but she seemed every bit as perplexed as they.

  “Anasûrimbor Serwa mil’ir,” she called out. “Anasûrimbor Kellhus ish’alurij pil—”

  The Nonman barked out another command—in the Emwama tongue, Sorweel realized—but there was no response from the prostrate masses. The otherworldly figure paused some ten paces before Serwa, his nimil skirts shimmering where they swayed, his marmoreal face devoid of passion. His companions formed a loose and cadaverous assembly behind him.

  “Niomi mi’sisra,” Serwa ventured once again, her tone searching and conciliatory. “Nil’gisha soimi—”

  “Hu’jajil!” the Nonman cried.

  Serwa and Moënghus fell almost immediately to their knees, dropped their faces to the cracked ground. Witless, Sorweel was late in following, which was why he saw the Emwama behind Moënghus rise and, as quick as a dog slaps its tail, club the base of his skull. He cried out, tried to leap clear of the pungent little beasts, but the small callused hand had seized him once more—as did innumerable others, wrenching, twisting, pinching, striking. He heard Serwa frantically shouting in Ihrimsû. He glimpsed Moënghus somehow roaring back to his feet, shrugging the wretches from his great shoulders, swinging one from a strapped arm—

  But an impact knocked all vision from him, snatched away his legs.

  Clawing. Screeching. Stink and blackness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Momemn

  Men, who belong to nature, apprehend their nature as Law when it seems to them to be restrained, and as nature when it seems to them to be unruly. Thus do some Sages say that a lie, merely, divides Men from Beasts.

  —MEMGOWA, The Book of Divine Acts

  Early Autumn, 20 New Imperial Year (4132, Year-of-the-Tusk), Momemn

  “Catch,” the Whore of Momemn calls across sunlight …

  But the peach is already in his hand.

  In the vast and vacant gloo
m of Xothei, the Gift-of-Yatwer stands motionless beside the idol of his Mother, watching several doddering priests raise and bear the carcass of their Shriah away. Three of them spit upon the floor at his feet. He looks back as the Inchausti lead him away, sees himself standing in the shadow of his gilded Mother.

  Horns rifle the sky. Hoe and Earth! Hoe and Earth! Wicked Momemn lays blotted, struck from the Book for its iniquities. The Empress calls across the remains of the sun. “Catch …”

  He does not so much wash as rinse the blood from his hands.

  A thin and oddly-apparelled girl joins their company, Theliopa, whose subtlety has been honed into simplicity. “Someone who was there when it happens,” he explains to her, even as he watches her vanish beneath crashing black.

  The Empress tosses a peach … “Catch.”

  The fingers he submerges are brown, and yet crimson blooms through the water.

  The Empress peers into his mien. “What you did … How could it be possible?”

  Ruby-red beads hang quivering from the pads of his fingers. He cranes his ear down to listen: the water chirps ever so faintly. The ripples bloat out across all creation.

  All Creation.

  Blaring horns. A black city roiling, bracing.

  “Catch.”

  The rooves slump, first to one knee, then another. The Mother sheds her tear, gives what has been given. He watches himself cast what is broken, sees the Aspect-Emperor stumble, then vanish beneath the Mother’s heel.

  He turns from the Sea, where the sun splints the back of dark waters, and he gazes out to the summer-weary fields of the south; he sees himself standing upon a greener hill, gazing at where he now stands at the Empress’s side.

  His Mother gathers him in clacking arms of ruin.

  Kellhus would often chide Esmenet for her perpetual misgivings. He would remind her that Men, despite any chest-thumping declaration to the contrary, sought servitude to the simple degree they hungered for power. “If you cannot trust in your station,” he would say, “at least take heart in their greed, Esmi. Dispense your authority as milk, and they will come racing as kittens … Nothing makes Men so meek as ambition.”

  And race after her they did.

  She had assumed it had been the Inchausti calling after her as she had searched the Andiamine Heights. But as she wandered back down the darkened halls with Kelmomas, she encountered Amarsla, one of her body-slaves, who collapsed wailing at her feet. “I found her!” the old matron began crying to the frescoed ceilings. “Praise Seju, I found her!” And others began to emerge from the gilded maze, first an Eothic Officer whose name she could not recall, then lumbering Keopsis, the Exalt-Counter …

  Despite the general panic, word of Maithanet’s death and her de facto restoration had swept through the streets of Momemn, and those souls dispossessed by her brother-in-law’s coup began flocking back to the Imperial Precincts, their erstwhile home. Fairly a dozen trailed her and Kelmomas by the time they reached the Scuari Campus, where dozens more awaited, a motley that cheered with wild abandon. Clutching Kelmomas to her waist, she stood sobbing with disbelief and gratitude …

  Then set about seizing the collective reins they offered.

  She disengaged the bestial apparition that was Kelmomas, commended him, despite his wailing protestations, to the ministrations of Larsippas, one of the palace physician-priests. He needed to be cleansed, dressed, and fed, certainly, as well as examined for illness or infection. His skin was Zeumi dark, stained as if he had hidden in a vat of dye. He wore nothing more than his bed-time smock, the linen transformed into leather for the laminations of filth. His hair, once flaxen and immaculate, was as black as her own, here matted into manure-like clumps, there twined into rat tails. The expressions of those recognizing him for the first time were universally appalled. Some even went so far as to sign finger charms, as though she had plucked him from death and damnation rather than hiding and squalor.

  “Mumma, no!” he blubbered.

  “Do you hear those drums?” she asked, clasping his shoulders and kneeling before him. “Do you understand what they mean?”

  The boy’s blue eyes seemed even more bright, more canny, shining from blood-swart cheeks.

  He isn’t what you think he is …

  The small Prince-Imperial nodded reluctantly.

  “Finding you safe was simply the beginning, Kel,” she said. “Now I must keep you safe! Do you understand, Sweetling?”

  “Yes, Mumma.”

  She cupped his cheek and smiled reassurance. Larsippus drew him away, shouting for someone to draw water. She allowed herself three doting heartbeats before setting aside motherhood and taking up the Empire—becoming the very thing that those watching so desperately needed her to be: Anasûrimbor Esmenet, the Blessed Empress of the Three Seas.

  The Inchausti comprised the sum of her military. She would later discover that the Pillarians had died to a man defending her home and her children. Apparently some Eothic Guardsmen had surrendered, but shame would delay their appearance. Of the Imperial Apparati she had seen at Xothei, a good number had also followed her to the palace—those who had known her well enough to trust her forgiving nature, she would later realize. The others, those who had fled out of fear of retribution, she would never see again.

  She began by embracing Ngarau, the old and indispensable Grand Seneschal she had inherited from the Ikurei Dynasty.

  “My House is out of order,” she said, gazing into the eunuch’s pouched eyes.

  “No longer, my Glory.”

  Dark and lurching, Ngarau began moving among the assembly, bellowing commands. Migrations toward various quarters of the palace and elsewhere immediately began thinning the crowd, leaving only kneeling soldiery and Imperial Apparati behind. Phinersa, her erstwhile Master of Spies, knelt among them, his svelte form clad in the black-silk robes he had made his uniform. When she turned to regard him, the small man proved as nimble at falling to his face as he was at everything else.

  “You knew nothing of the coup?” she cried at the maul of black hair.

  “I knew nothing,” he said into the cobble. “I failed you, my Glory.”

  “Stand up,” she exclaimed, her voice cracking for disgust, not so much at Phinersa as at the tragic toll of the insanity that had seized them all. Chaos and revolt across the Three Seas. Innumerable deaths, near as well as far. Sharacinth. Imhailas. Inrilatas …

  Samarmas.

  “You heard what Maithanet said at Xothei?”

  “Yes,” the man replied, his voice muted, his clean-shaven face blank with care. She had expected him to leap into his old, insinuating manner as much as too his feet, but he remained wary. “That you and he were to be reconciled.”

  Which would make her the savage one, the more murderous Anasûrimbor.

  “No,” she said, staring at him carefully. He had the cheek and jaw of a soft man, she decided. “That the Empire was never meant to survive …”

  Because her displeasure was clear, the Master of Spies bowed his head to the degree demanded by jnan—no more. Esmenet looked to the other Apparati kneeling at points about her on the Scuari Campus.

  “That was a lie!” she cried in a clear, bold voice. “That was proof of the cancer that had poisoned his soul! Would my husband abandon his wife? Would the Holy Aspect-Emperor leave his children to their ruin? If he foresaw the collapse of his Holy Empire, then surely he would have hidden his wife and children away!”

  Her voice rang bright across the stone expanse. She saw Vem-Mithriti, her sorcerous Vizier, hobbling to join the motley assembly, his black and gold robes of the Imperial Saik comically distended for the winds off the Meneanor.

  “And that means our Lord-and-Prophet foresaw quite the opposite! That he prophecied our triumph, that Momemn would break the back of the Fanim Dog—that the mightiest Empire of our age would survive!”

  Silence, save for the rhythmic throb of Fanim war-drums … But there was wonder and worship enough in their look, she supposed. />
  She looked back to her Master-of-Spies, afforded him a momentary glimpse of her terror.

  “Do you know what happens?” she asked on a murmur.

  He shook his head, looked out to the line of the walls. “They struck my chains scarce a watch before yours, my Glory.”

  She clenched his arm in a spontaneous gesture of reassurance.

  “All of us must be strong now,” she said. “Strong and cunning.”

  The Inchausti Knights milled in the near distance, watching from the monumental stair of the Allosium Forum. She raised an arm, beckoned their white-bearded commander, Clia Saxillas. The Massentian officer moved with the haste appropriate to his station, and no more. She bid the man rise after he had kissed her knee.

  “I assassinated your Shriah,” she said.

  The caste-noble stared at her sandaled feet. “Aye, my Glory.”

  “Do you hate me?” she asked.

  He dared look into her eyes. “I thought I did.”

  The pulsing drums as much as exhaustion made her gaze indomitable. The man blinked, looked to the ground with more fear than reverence. And at that moment it seemed she could feel it radiating about her, looming above and leaning out …

  The shadow of her accursed husband.

  “And now?”

  The man licked his lips. “I am not sure.”

  She nodded.

  “The Inchaustic Knights guard me and my children now, Saxillas … You are my new Exalt-Captain.”

  The man hesitated for the merest heartbeat, an instant that revealed the profundity of his grief, the fact that he mourned the death of his Shriah the way another might mourn the death of a beloved father.

  “Deploy your men,” she continued. “See that the Imperial Precincts are secured.” She paused a moment, her thoughts fraught with the enormity—perhaps impossibility—of the task that lay before her …

  The drums throbbed … recounted the horrors of Caraskand.

  “Then retrieve my assassin from Xothei.”